The Thought-Fox Summary

Summary

“The Thought-Fox” appeared in Hughes’s first collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), and is one of his most celebrated and anthologized poems. This poem contains many of the stylistic and thematic elements that have come to define Hughes’s poetry. In terms of Hughes’s poetic development, this poem was unmistakably his breakthrough, signaling his departure from the rhetorical and Metaphysical poetry and his movement toward mythmaking.

The poem comprises a reverie by immediately invoking the imagination in the first line: “I imagine this midnight moment’s forest.” The alliteration in this line suggests a casting of a spell. The first stanza of this twenty-four-line poem arranged in quatrains evokes solitude; plainly, the writer is working late at night alone, the only sound being “the clock’s loneliness.” Beyond the writer’s domain of time and the blank page exists the primordial force of the imagination.

The poet becomes actively aware of the approach of the nearness of the other or the imagination in the second stanza. The poet stands at literal and figurative thresholds: He stares at a blank page, which becomes the dark window, the starless sky, and then into the forest’s darkness. In the third stanza, the poet has crossed these various thresholds to make contact with this totem-figure of the unconscious or the imagination. Both the poet and the metaphorical fox are tentative in their approaches....